Archive for August, 2007

Because 100 facts in 100 days is just a little too ambitious and repetitive for my tastes.

Fact #1

I have much better things to do with my time than bore everyone with 100 facts about myself. Besides, when I become rich and famous some day… those things will come back to bite me in the ass by all the trash magazines. Fact. Think about that next time you tell the world your dirty little secrets.

Here’s another tip too: Beware of gifts left on your desk over the weekend. Especially when your office isn’t open on the weekends and you don’t recognize the name on the post-it note attached to the gift. It could be Al-Queda. I hear they are into that sort of thing.

For the past couple of days two of our big bosses are in Hong Kong visiting and attending meetings and such. Being the nice guys that they are, they invited the entire office out to lunch at a fancy / expensive dim sum restaurant yesterday at City Hall. We had two huge tables full of people. We ordered dim sum from the ladies pushing the funny little trolleys around and they would hand us baskets of yummy goodness. It was fun and the food was really good. OK, so that’s the location.

Now for the setup. A week or so ago, a friend and co-worker showed me a pair of tiny red shoes with funny stitched tiger faces on the toes and little whiskers that stuck out. She said that they were called “tiger shoes” and she had a friend send her the pair from the mainland. She told me it was very traditional and nice to get a baby a pair of tiger shoes. They were cute but odd looking. So the other day I pass by a store that seemingly has two names (Goods of Desire and Delay No More are both displayed in huge letters) and carries lots of odd clothes and accessories. I notice in their display window that they have adult size tiger shoes. How cool is that? And then I forgot about it.

A friend of ours was really nice on Sunday and showed us around two new areas of Hong Kong (to us) that we hadn’t seen before. We explored the athletic/sports area and a mall called Trendy (or something like that) in Mong Kok and the computer/game mall in Sham Shui Po with our friendly guide. Both areas are very crowded on Sundays and when we go back, it will definitely be on another day of the week.

When leaving a mall where every store was phone stores (seriously) we saw a shop that had an iPhone box. So we stopped in and asked about it since they aren’t available here through normal channels yet. The price was laughable. OK maybe that is the wrong word. Perhaps hysterical would be better.

They wanted 12,000 Hong Kong dollars for the phone itself. That would be approximately $1538.46 in US dollars. Just for the phone. Now for the kicker: they wanted an additional 5,000 HK dollars to unlock the phone for use with the local mobile service providers. That another $641 US dollars. So to get an iPhone in Hong Kong it would cost approximately $2,180 US dollars. Yeah. That’s insane.

And that doesn’t even include service.

So yes, you can get a new Apple iPhone here in Hong Kong but you better be able to wipe your ass with money if you are going to be able to afford one.